The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) on Monday released footage of the luxuriously appointed bunker where Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar was hiding before Israeli ground forces killed him last week.
The bunker, located beneath Sinwar’s hometown of Khan Yunis, included a massive stockpile of cash, weapons, and ammunition, plus numerous creature comforts, including a private shower and a full kitchen.
Sinwar’s bathroom was supplied with an assortment of shampoos and shower gels. His kitchen was extensively stocked with provisions bearing the logo of the United Nations Relief Works Agency (UNRWA), the controversial U.N. agency for Palestine that has been accused of working far too closely with Hamas terrorists.
As seen in the IDF video, Sinwar’s personal safe was packed with stacks of plastic-wrapped Israeli currency.
Israel has long accused Hamas and other Palestinian terrorist groups of siphoning billions of dollars from foreign aid programs for the people of Gaza, as well as stealing food, fuel, and medicine sent by humanitarian agencies.
Also of interest was a CCTV video from the Hamas tunnel network showing Sinwar’s wife Abu Zamar carrying what appeared to be a very expensive designer handbag, possibly worth over $32,000, although some Internet sources have argued it might have been a less expensive knockoff bag.
This video was evidently recorded when Sinwar moved his family into the tunnel network the night before the October 7 attack on Israeli civilians.
Hamas was able to pinch enough money from foreign aid to the Palestinian people to build a gigantic tunnel network, stretching for hundreds of miles beneath Gaza. According to the IDF, Sinwar was nearly captured in his bunker beneath Khan Yunis in February, but he abandoned it for another hiding place just in time.
He wound up in Rafah, the last Hamas stronghold, which he was attempting to flee when he ran into Israeli ground troops who cornered and killed him last week. Israeli troops found his Rafah bunker in August, complete with the corpses of six kidnapped Israelis he was using as human shields. One of them was reportedly American-Israeli hostage Hersh Goldberg-Polin.
According to an Israeli media report, Sinwar’s personal human shields were too weak from hunger to move when he fled the Rafah bunker, having subsisted on a diet of energy bars for months, so he simply had them executed.
The Times of London speculated the IDF is rushing to release videos of Sinwar’s bunker to counter the efforts of Hamas and Iranian mythmakers to portray him as a defiant frontline fighter whose final act of defiance was tossing a stick at an Israeli drone:
For some Palestinians, footage of Sinwar’s final moments shows a determined fighter wrapped in a keffiyeh, a traditional scarf, using his last strength to try to knock down an Israeli drone.
The images, along with photographs of Sinwar’s splayed corpse, have been interpreted across the Arab world as a contradiction of the Israeli narrative that Sinwar was cowering in Hamas’ extensive tunnel network throughout the war, and the IDF appears to have inadvertently shown Sinwar at the vanguard of the fight. Israel is planning to demolish the house in Tel al-Sultan where he was killed to stop it becoming a shrine.
The new footage released by the IDF could be intended to puncture this mythologizing by showing that Sinwar “enjoyed a comfier existence than the hundreds of thousands of his compatriots made homeless by Israeli attacks,” the Times postulated.
“He lives here in a good way, with all his millions, while the civilians above ground are living in poverty and are starving,” the IDF soldier narrating the tour of Sinwar’s bunker said in the video.
